Just Tell Me I Can't (15 page)

“Lou was very smart and a lot of what you saw with him on the field was deliberate,” says Hall of Famer Pat Gillick, general manager in Seattle from 2000 through 2003. “He'd think his team needed to be awakened and he'd do something to stir it awake.”

No wonder he and Moyer hit it off. Even in his playing days, Piniella was constantly looking for a mental edge. “I was no home run hitter, so if I came up with two outs in the early innings, I'd maybe get a slider and I'd roll over on it, bounce out, and let the pitcher and catcher think they could get me out that way,” Piniella, a .291 lifetime hitter, told the
Seattle Times
in 1995. “Then later in the game, maybe the score is close, maybe we need a runner, maybe with runners on, I'd be thinking they'd go slider when they had to make an out pitch. If I got a fastball up and in, I could tell for sure a slider was coming next, down and away.”

As a manager over twenty-three seasons, Piniella and his will to win not only infected his teams, it imbued his charges with his personality—combative, cunning, intense. “Playing for Lou was like having another teammate, he wanted to win so badly,” Moyer recalls.

But Piniella's famous fire had a downside too, particularly for pitchers. He'd throw tirades when his pitchers walked batters. In the dugout, he'd berate pitching coaches in front of the team. “WHY ARE WE NIBBLING?” he'd roar. Moyer saw how some pitchers would allow Piniella to impede their focus, so put off were they by his second-guessing. Moyer, however, welcomed Piniella's feedback, even if it was harsh. You always knew where you stood with Lou. Moyer was similarly candid with Piniella. In fact, when Lou visited the mound, Moyer would do something few pitchers ever do: tell the truth.

“How you feeling?” Piniella asked one time.

“Well, Skip, I've got half a tank,” Moyer replied.

Piniella eyeballed him. “What the hell does that mean?”

Moyer didn't want to come out, but he felt obligated to level with his manager. “It means I'm half full and half empty,” he said. Piniella smirked and put his hand out for the ball.

Moyer was receptive to Piniella's coaching because, in his experiences with his father and Harvey, he had learned to tell the difference between criticism and coaching. He wanted to be challenged. And ever since his first day in a Seattle uniform, when Piniella signaled that he believed in him, Moyer didn't want to let his manager down.

Now, in his first full season with Seattle, he had taken Piniella's advice and flummoxed the Dodgers with 36 changeups, 11 for outs. It would be the turning point of his career.

Moyer would go 17–5 in 1997, with an ERA of 3.86. His combined winning percentage of .789 in 1996 and 1997 was among the league leaders. Until he reinvented himself yet again with a revamped cutter in Philadelphia, he'd never again throw the changeup less than 28 percent of the time. Thanks to Skipper Lou, he'd made himself into an elite pitcher.

Unlike his relationship with, say, the curveball, Moyer's courtship of the changeup was long and complicated, characterized by fits and starts and disappointments, before culminating in wedded bliss after Piniella's 1997 intervention.

In the early '80s, Moyer was a dominant collegiate pitcher with essentially two pitches: a roughly 84-mile-per-hour fastball and the looping curve he could throw over the plate for strikes. At St. Joseph's University, that was enough; he rewrote the school's record book, setting a single-season mark for strikeouts (90), and winning 16 games (fourth all-time) with a 1.99 ERA. His ERA of 1.82 in 1984 was the twelfth best nationally.

But he knew his limited repertoire of pitches wouldn't be enough to get him drafted. Enter Kevin Quirk. Quirk had been a dominant St. Joe's righthander who had graduated from the school in 1981, Moyer's freshman year. Quirk was drafted by the Yankees, but never made it out of the minors. He returned to campus after two minor league seasons to help out the baseball team, his unique changeup in tow.

Befitting the name, Quirk was a free spirit, a hard partier who as a student had doubled as the St. Joe's Hawk, the mascot at basketball games who ceaselessly flaps his arms. (ESPN once applied a “flap-o-meter” to the Hawk during a telecast and concluded that the bird flapped its wings an average of 3,500 times per game.)

Quirk showed Moyer his changeup. Even to this day, there's no one way to throw a change. Some pitchers palm the ball, others throw a “circle change,” their fingers encircling the ball. Quirk's grip was particularly unusual. With the open horseshoe facing first base, his middle, ring, and pinkie fingers would grip the top of the ball. The index finger and thumb would rest off the ball, underneath it. It was almost as if he were making an “OK” sign with his fingers and wrapping it around the ball. The removal of the dominant index finger creates a looser grip and more backspin, slowing the ball down in flight.

Moyer must have thrown thousands of changeups before ever working up the courage to attempt it in a game. When he first tried it, the ball would either sail clear over the catcher's head or bounce well in front of the plate. But gradually he came to see the pitch for what it was: the ultimate deception. To this day, he calls it the most important pitch in baseball, other than the fastball. The grip allows you to throw the changeup with the same arm speed, and from the same release point, as the fastball, but it's far slower. Once he could master control of it, he knew he'd have something to counteract the lack of velocity on his fastball, something to regularly keep hitters off balance with.

By the time he was in the minors in the Cubs system, the changeup had become Jamie's best pitch. It was utterly emasculating to hitters; their eyes would widen as it approached the plate, so slow, so hittable, and yet they'd swing at it well in front of their bodies. And as more and more hitters trudged back to the dugout, unable to make contact with such a seemingly powder-puff pitch, Moyer began to understand for the first time what it was like to use the hitter's ego to his advantage.

But then something happened once he made it to the major leagues. He started to lose confidence in the pitch that had gotten him to that level. He started nibbling and being cautious with it, which led him to get behind in counts, which led him to throw fastballs when they were most expected. All of which eventually led him to Harvey Dorfman.

But it wasn't until, of all people, a consummate hitter—Piniella—gave him permission to have confidence in the changeup, to throw it with aggression, that he fully turned things around. Seattle GM Pat Gillick saw the transformation in real time.

“Nowadays, you watch a game, and all the announcers talk about is this guy throws 94, this guy touches 96,” Gillick says. “You never hear the word ‘deception.' But that's what pitching is. As video got more and more popular, hitters started to pretty much know what pitchers will throw on certain counts. But Jamie and guys like Jimmy Key, Greg Maddux, and Tom Glavine always had a knack for throwing the unexpected pitch in an unexpected location when the hitter least expected it.”

In baseball, there's a difference between throwers and pitchers, a distinction that is often predicated on mastery of the changeup. In the late '90s, Moyer became one of the best changeup pitchers in the game, right up there with his friend Trevor Hoffman. There are still great changeup pitchers today—Johan Santana and Cole Hamels come to mind—but not as many. And the ones who do remain tend to be guys who also have the option of rearing back and blowing the ball by hitters, like Justin Verlander.

Moyer and contemporaries like Key, Maddux, and Glavine had to rely on their guile and craft. And Moyer ended up outlasting them all. “You could almost say Jamie was the last pitcher,” Gillick says, laughing. “I know this: if he were coming out of college today throwing 83 or 84, he wouldn't get much of a look. Best case, he'd be a guy who you keep in the minors a long time, see if he can develop.”

As Moyer developed, so did the Mariners. For the next six years, he found himself on an immensely talented team, one that shared his work ethic and hunger to get better. There was no longer any reason to be shy about his Dorfman-prescribed pregame mental rituals; turned out that every Mariner had some form of idiosyncratic routine.

Randy Johnson, who went 20–4 in Moyer's first full year in Seattle, was a perfectly pleasantly fellow four days a week. But on the day of a start he wore a scowl and no one spoke to him. Designated hitter Edgar Martinez would spend hours every day in the batting cage—but not hitting baseballs. Instead, he'd fill the hitting machine with tennis balls, on which he would have written numbers with a black felt-tip pen. He'd hit each ball while simultaneously yelling out the number on it—a daily exercise in concentration and focus.

Then there was Ken Griffey Jr., probably the most talented player Moyer had ever seen. Moyer marveled at Junior's raw ability. In 1997, Griffey was the American League MVP, with 56 home runs, 147 runs batted in, a .304 average, and a league-high .646 slugging percentage. Yet Moyer never once saw him so much as stretch before a game. His sole form of preparation was to take batting practice early, sending balls rocketing into the seats to the delight of the legions of fans who would arrive in time to see Junior's pregame show.

As talented as Griffey was, he was also one of the guys. The Mariners in the late '90s and early 2000s often socialized off the field, and, unlike many superstars, Griffey was part of the mix. Not so a young Alex Rodriguez, whose talents rivaled Junior's. He led the AL in hitting with a .358 average in 1996, hit 23 home runs in 1997, and then hit over 40 per season for his remaining three years in Seattle. His teammates always sensed that he was destined for a bigger-market club, somewhere like New York or Los Angeles. “There's nothing wrong with that,” Moyer says, thinking back. “Someone's gotta play in those places.”

Moyer came to learn that, as important as superstars like Griffey and Rodriguez were to the team's success, just as important were teammates like Jay Buhner and John Marzano, guys who were hardly destined for Cooperstown but whose leadership qualities and fun-loving personalities contributed mightily to the “we're all in this together” mind-set that characterized the Mariners for Moyer's first six years in Seattle.

Rightfielder Buhner was a born leader, someone who knew when to joke around with a teammate and when to get in his face. He also had an innate way of reaching out to the fans. One promotion was Buhner Buzz Night, which found the follically challenged outfielder in front of the stadium before a game, shaving fans' heads and giving away free tickets to his victims. By then, the Mariners and their fans had fallen into a full-blown love affair, and Buhner was one of its catalysts.

Moyer took note. The more he was accepted, the more he and Karen grew to love Seattle, and the more secure he grew to be in his role on the team. The Mariners debuted a series of funny, self-deprecating TV commercials featuring Moyer. One, called “The Change-Up,” showed a pitch heading for home plate in slow motion, while the catcher and batter have time to chat about a new seafood restaurant downtown—before the pitch is called a strike and Moyer deadpans, “I put a little something extra on that one.”

Just as important to team chemistry was backup catcher Marzano, who hailed from South Philly and who would later die in a tragic 2008 fall down the steps at his home. Marzano called everybody “Cuz” and was always running his mouth—loosening up Griffey, which helped make the superstar one of the guys.

“Nice game today,” Griffey might say to Marzano—who
hadn't
played. Marzano would come back with a crack about Griffey's silk shirt and leather pants, a decidedly un-Seattle style of dress.

Buhner was the first judge of the Mariners' Kangaroo Court, a player-created system with the power to levy fines, designed to spur morale and establish subtle codes of conduct. Buhner would carry around a shoebox and players could bring a claim by writing their grievance against a teammate on a piece of paper, naming their witness, and placing it in the shoebox. Claims couldn't be brought for on-field missteps; rather, the court adjudicated baseball's mores, the unwritten rules that govern the game, like how long a teammate could fraternize with an opposing player before a game. A Mariner would time how long others spent shooting the breeze at the opposition's dugout. If a teammate yapped away for more than two minutes, there'd be a case filed against him in the shoebox kept in the Seattle dugout. When the case was tried—when Edgar Martinez succeeded Buhner, he actually wore a robe and carried a gavel when court was in session—fines would be assessed. At the end of the year, the total of fines collected would be given to charity, or, more often, used for a team party.

It was all coming together. Moyer was on the type of team he had always fantasized about, a team with a shared sense of purpose. And with his newfound confidence in the changeup, he was an integral member of it. Moyer followed his breakout 1997 year with two solid seasons, going 15–9 with a 3.53 ERA in 1998, followed by a 14–8 record and a 3.87 ERA in 1999.

He sustained some injuries in 2000, starting the year with a shoulder injury and ending it by suffering a hairline fracture of the left kneecap in a simulated game before the American League Championship Series that kept him from facing the Yankees, the eventual World Series champion. His record was 13–10 with a high 5.49 ERA, but it was all good. He'd use his first taste of inconsistency in three seasons to fuel his off-​s
eason
workouts, a furious regimen designed to prepare for 2001, where magic awaited. But first there would be a different kind of magic.

Michele and Jerry Metcalf figured the meeting would follow a familiar script. It was 1998 and their fifteen-year-old daughter, Erin, was a rabid Mariners fan. She was also battling liver cancer. Through the Make-A-Wish Foundation, the nonprofit organization that grants wishes to patients facing life-threatening illness, Erin's wish was about to come true: dinner with a couple of Mariners during spring training.